Site Mobile Navigation

It Riles a Village

I WENT to find my aunt Ruth in Judson Church among the disgruntled at a public hearing last month about New York University’s latest proposal to expand its Greenwich Village campus. It was a couple of weeks before the local community board denounced the proposal outright. A light mist was falling. I climbed the church steps. Beyond the long tables, where children drew with crayons, a bobbing sea of homemade placards demanded, “Flowers Not Towers.”

I had been one of those children at the long tables years ago. This sort of meeting felt like home, in the neighborhood where I had grown up in a cheerful culture of endless protest at a time when N.Y.U. was not yet one of the biggest and most ambitious private universities in the country but still a modest school proudly catering to working New Yorkers like my mother and Ruth.

The storm over NYU 2031, as this latest expansion proposal is called, has escalated into one of the city’s most acrimonious land-use battles. No wonder. The plan is so clearly oversize that it’s hard not to see it as a stalking horse for what school officials figure they can get permission from the city to build. The proposal envisions constructing some 2.5 million square feet (the rough equivalent of the Empire State Building) over the next 20 years on a pair of superblocks owned by the university below Washington Square Park. The blocks are now dominated by midcentury tower-in-the-park faculty residences called Washington Square Village and University Village.

Common sense and the billions of dollars that the project would cost suggest the university would be hard pressed to build half of what it’s outlining during the next decade or two. The question is which half of NYU 2031 ought to get a go-ahead, if either. The school, meanwhile, is expanding its satellite campus in Brooklyn and its medical center in Midtown. Universities in the city move their campuses from time to time. Columbia did it in the 1890s, quitting Midtown for Morningside Heights. N.Y.U.’s ultimate development may lie beyond the Village. In any case, this latest proposed expansion should not be the start of some new open-ended phase of growth in the neighborhood but the end of it.

What does N.Y.U. want? Urban universities, like hospitals, are engines of civic economies, and the best ones have to keep up with new technologies and expanding programs in a competitive marketplace: they need state-of-the-art facilities to attract top talent. The city has been banking a good part of its future on intellectual capital: Cornell’s prospective campus on Roosevelt Island, Columbia’s in Manhattanville. N.Y.U. contributes to the cultural lifeblood of the Village, adding, among other things, ethnic diversity to an area that celebrates its historic reputation as America’s bohemian capital but is increasingly home for the super rich. The school needs to upgrade and consolidate its core.

And what does the neighborhood need? Among other things, open space, green space. The debate over the development of the two superblocks has turned a fresh spotlight on the underrated urban virtues of Washington Square Village and University Village — examples of how tower-in-the-park architecture, descended from Le Corbusier and widely discredited, can benefit an old neighborhood of brownstones and low-rise loft buildings if the city is dense, healthy and vibrant enough. The task is balancing necessary development with a local ecosystem.

The most radical part of what N.Y.U. wants is to construct two tall, crescent-shaped towers, 400,000 square between them (the architecture is still notional) on the 1.5 acres of open space between the two apartment slabs of Washington Square Village. Beneath that open space, in lieu of the current parking garage, the university wants to dig several floors down to create 770,000 square feet of underground classrooms.

This would entail, among other things, demolishing the raised concrete garden by Hideo Sasaki from 1959 that is one of the country’s earliest parking garage roof structures, beloved by landscape historians, with its boxed crabapples, cherry and willow trees. I used to play in it as a boy. It’s a severe park but peaceful. The Village has notoriously few public refuges, aside from Washington Square Park. This is one of them, though most people don’t even realize it exists.

That’s because over the years the university has effectively closed off the open space between the buildings with fences and gates, obscured it behind a cheap retail strip mall on La Guardia Place and allowed what should be accessible parkland to languish while arguing that building the towers with fresh landscaping around them would create an improvement. Demolition by neglect is the term of art.

The open space on these superblocks was originally calibrated to take into account the density of the apartment slabs. Private developers in New York are forever seeking exemptions to get around constraints that zoning or other forms of regulation establish precisely to protect neighborhoods from overbuilding and to preserve landmarks. These developers are very often successful, the approval system for circumventing restrictions being notoriously vulnerable to politics and influence. N.Y.U. stresses that in this case it’s actually asking to rezone the superblocks with a net increase, not decrease, in publicly accessible open space, proving the school is trying to do what’s right for the neighborhood.

But this is tricky because the calculation has to do with where that open space would be. It’s essential to consider that these superblocks were created during the 1950s through a slum-clearance program of urban renewal under Robert Moses’s authority that justified its exercise of eminent domain as a matter of public interest. So in a sense public interest, and not just N.Y.U.’s interest, continues to hold a special claim over the protection and disposition of the blocks’ open space.

The crescent towers devised by N.Y.U.’s team — Toshiko Mori Architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Grimshaw Architects — are nonstarters by virtue of their bulk and height, but they do raise another interesting issue. Theoretically, increased density is an urban virtue. The Village is not as dense as some Villagers worry it is. Filling in some of the open space around tower-in-the-park housing projects with retail and street life often makes sense. The clash of different sorts of architecture, cheek by jowl, as the crescent towers would do with the ’50s slabs, is a defining virtue of great cities.

But Washington Square Village is faculty housing smack in the middle of a prosperous, low-rise neighborhood where there’s no shortage of retail. There is a need to breathe, though, a need for the sort of open space that these tower-in-the-park layouts originally provided.

Washington Square Park, a block away, is something else. A landmark destination, crowded and bigger, it’s a place for spectacle. But neighborhoods still need neighborhood spaces for other sorts of personal interactions. The city should veto the crescent towers at Washington Square Village and compel the university really to open that space up: redesign and reactivate it as a park for Villagers, not just for freshmen skateboarders and iPod-engrossed graduate students.

In other words, make the whole thing a gift from the university to the neighborhood from which the school draws so much of its marketing muscle. Below-ground classrooms would still be fine if a new park could be designed at a continuous grade with the street, so that foot traffic flows easily into and out of it from all directions.

In exchange the city should allow N.Y.U. another big part of its plan: to replace its appalling gymnasium, a windowless brick fortress and blight on Mercer Street from the early 1980s, when the university’s architectural message to the city was: Drop dead. Instead of the existing Coles Sports & Recreation Center the university can have its proposed multitower building, called the Zipper, not quite as big as imagined and accompanied by a promise of public amenities along with the pedestrian thoroughfare that is now part of the proposal, which would roughly extend Greene Street north. This would return some life to that forlorn corner of the Village, which has been abandoned for years to college gym rats.

The city could also approve a dormitory atop a prospective public school where there’s now a supermarket near the corner of Bleecker Street and La Guardia Place. A new elementary school would bring another potential boon to the neighborhood, so long as the city decides it actually wants a school there. (That’s not clear yet.) The proposed school and dorm, at 14 stories, would loom over the adjoining gardens and the buildings across La Guardia. (“Goodbye Greenwich Village, Hello Midtown” says a protest sign on the garden fence.) But the site needs some building to anchor that corner and the fine 1960s landmarked high-rises of University Village, called Silver Towers, two of which house faculty, the third, residents of a Mitchell-Lama cooperative.

A beautiful new 1.5-acre park, an elementary school, public amenities and a new pedestrian street to awaken a dead corner: all that seems like a fair trade for the neighborhood in return for a couple of the big buildings the university wants, which would replace undistinguished ones. N.Y.U. would get about half of what it’s proposing, or maybe more. It has an unfortunate knack for commissioning some of the worst work from big-name architects (Bobst Library, the Kimmel Center), so everything will finally depend on vigilant oversight of the architectural details. But, in principle, what results could actually improve that stretch of the Village, and not just benefit the university.

I couldn’t find my aunt in the crowd at Judson Church that morning. Fading vision has slowed her down lately, so when the meeting ended, I figured I had time before she made it down the steps to check out Washington Square Village and University Village again.

By the time I was a boy, University Village and Washington Square Village were facts of the neighborhood. Older Villagers, like my parents and aunt and uncle and their friends, watched the changes with trepidation. I took them for granted.

My friends and I ran around the gardens, under the trees, and rode the elevators to get bird’s-eye views back down onto my building a few streets west. The glory of the Village was its diversity and the ever-present light and sky, immediate and enveloping over all the low buildings. But this modern world was for me fresh and amazing. The mash-up of architectural styles went along with the magnanimity of the neighborhood’s self-image.

Designed by Paul Lester Wiener, Washington Square Village is one of the city’s underrated architectural successes, immense without somehow seeming so big, its mass broken up by terraces and panels of glazed bricks in primary colors and white, and by the generous open space between the slabs.

Likewise, it’s partly the too-formal but generous space around Silver Towers (the work of James Ingo Freed at I. M. Pei & Associates) that makes those towers look elegant and almost slender. They’re cast-in-place rectangular concrete structures, Brutalist in concept, but with deep-set windows and a pinwheel plan that presents to passers-by a constantly shifting series of profiles, changing with the light of day. Stolid, sober, with their sculptured facades, like high-rise Sol LeWitts, the towers have helped keep the Village from becoming too cute.

Perceptions shift with generations. Some young Villagers I talked to on the street that morning said they found it easy to picture N.Y.U.’s proposed expansion. That was heartening in a way, but they also said they would love more park space.

I spotted my aunt struggling down the church steps. She took my arm, and I guided her up the street to a coffee shop a few blocks away where she railed against the university plan. A few protesters floated past, toting their placards. I laid out my compromise to her, and we argued for a while, then kissed goodbye before I walked to the subway in the drizzle.